As to God and divine filiation, everybody is welcome to his own interpretation. He may form with O. Pfleiderer the “Neoprotestantism”which, “after breaking with all ecclesiastical dogmas, recalled to mind the truths of the Christian religion, hidden beneath the surface of these dogmas, in order to realize, more purely and more perfectly than ever before, the truth of God's incarnation in the new forms of autonomous thought and of the moral life of human society.” Christianity and God—the symbols of autonomous man! Or he may follow Bousset, to whom nature is God, and in this way combines harmoniously Christianity and Atheism. “This is the forceful evolution of Christian religion,” says he, “the notion of redemption, the Dogma of the divinity of Christ, the trinity, the idea of satisfaction and sacrifice, miracles, the old conception of revelation—all these we see carried off by this wave of progress.” “What is left? Timid people may think: a wreck. But to our pleasant surprise we found stated at many points in our inquiry: what is left is the simple Gospel of Jesus.” And what does this simplified Gospel contain? “Of course we cannot simply accept in full the Gospel of Jesus.... There is the internal and the external. The external and non-essential includes the judgment of the world, angels, miracles, inspiration, and other things.” All this may be disregarded. “But even the essentials, the internal of the Gospel cannot be simply subscribed to. They must be interpreted.” What, then, is this essential, this internal of the Gospel, and what is its interpretation? “The belief of the Gospel in the personal heavenly Father; to this we hold fast with all our strength. But we carry this belief in God into our modern thought.” And what becomes then of “God”? “To us, God is no longer the kind Father above the starry skies. God is the Infinite, Omnipotent, who is active in the immense universe, in infiniteness of time and space, in infinitely small and in infinitely large things. He is the God whose garb is the iron law of nature which hides Him from the human eye by a compact, impenetrable veil.” We see the belief of the Gospel has dwindled down to atheistic Monism.
As early as 1874 Ed. von Hartmann, in his book “Die Selbstzersetzung des Christentums,” came to the conclusion that “liberal Protestantism has in no sense the right to claim a place within Christendom.” In a later book his keen examination demonstrates how the speculation of liberal Protestantism has changed the Christian religion step by step into pantheism: “Not a single point in the doctrine of the Church is spared by this upheaval of principle, every dogma is formally turned into its very opposite, in order to make its religious idea conform to the tenet of divine immanence.”
This is called the development of Christianity. It is this “religious progress,” the same “free Christianity,” that they are now trying to promote by international congresses. The invitation to the “World's Congress for free Christianity and religious progress” at Berlin, in 1910, was signed by more than 130 German professors, including [pg 286]47 theologians. We have here the development of the dying into the lifeless corpse, the progress of the strong castle into a dilapidated ruin, the advance of the rich man to beggary.
We began our inquiry with the question proposed some years ago by D. Strauss to his brethren-in-spirit: Are we still Christians? We may now quote the answer, which he gives at the conclusion of his own investigation: “Now, I think, we are through. And the result? the reply to my question?—must I state it explicitly? Very well; my conviction is, that if we do not want to make excuses, if we do not want to shift and shuffle and quibble, if yes is to be yes, and no to remain no, in short, if we desire to speak like honest, sincere men, we must confess: we are no longer Christians.”
This is the bitter fruit of autonomous freedom of thinking, which, declining any guidance by faith, recognizes no other judge of truth than individual reason, with all the license and the hidden inclinations that rule it. Protestantism has adopted this freedom of research as its principle; in consistently applying it, Protestantism has completely denatured the Christian religion. If anything can prove irrefutably the monstrosity and cultural incapacity of modern freedom of research, it is the fate of Protestantism. Any one capable of seriously judging serious things must realize here how pernicious this freedom is for the human mind.
Reduced to Beggary.
But the loss is even greater. The better class of paganism still clung to the general notion of an existing personal God, of a future life, of a reward after death; it was convinced of the existence of an immortal soul and a future reward, of the necessity of religion, of immutable standards for morals and thought. Has liberal science at least been able to preserve this essential property of a higher paganism? Alas, no! It has lost nearly everything.
No longer has it a personal God. While belief in God may still survive in the hearts of many representatives of this science, it has vanished from science itself. It begs to be [pg 287] excused from accepting any solution of questions, if God is a factor in the solution. The opinion prevails that Kant has forever shattered all rational demonstrations of the existence of God. Yet Kant permits this existence as a “postulate,” which, according to Strauss, “may be regarded as the attic room, where God who has been retired from His office may be decently sheltered and employed.” But now He has been given notice to quit even this refuge. There must be nothing left of Him but His venerable name, which is appropriated by the new apostasy in the guise of pantheism or a masked materialism. Monism is the joint name for it: this is the modern “belief in God.” In days gone by it was frankly called “atheism.”
This disappearance of the old belief in God is noted with satisfaction by modern science: “It is true,” says Paulsen, “the belief in gods ... is dying out, and will never be resurrected. Nor is there an essential difference whether many or only one of these beings are assumed. A monotheism which looks upon God as an individual being and lets him occasionally interfere in the world as in something separate from and foreign to him, such a monotheism is essentially not different from polytheism. If one should insist on such conception of theism, then, of course, it will be difficult to contradict those who maintain that science must lead to atheism.”
Therefore God, as a personal being, is dead, and will never come to life again. While there is an enormous exaggeration in these words, they nevertheless glaringly characterize the ideas of the science of which Paulsen is the mouthpiece. It does not want directly to give up the name of God; it serves as a mask to conceal the uncanny features of pantheism and materialism.